Feast or Famine

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????????So, I thought about starting this up a while back when I started preparing for the upcoming season, but with all the crazy weather and road closures I decided to wait till I had more interesting things to talk about.

????????The road we usually take up the canyon is still torn up and impassible to anything larger than a 4 wheeler. There's a lot of work that needs to be done to it and i'm wondering if the forest service will be able to clean it up this year. They haven't done much yet anyway. No matter though, we usually park and ride the wheelers in anyway, so I only feel bad for those that don't have access to that kind of transportation.


????????The road should have been right where that new river bed is located (plus 6ft higher) LOL! Then the river had to go and dry up on me. Silly nature, could have at least made a good fishin' hole out of it.

????????Well this year has a lot in store for me and my family. It's going to be a busy pre-season and a very busy rifle elk hunt. My father, uncle and cousin all drew their limited entry tags in the same unit. Luckily we are all hunting the same unit so we'll be able to piggy back of each other and should have some amazing success stories.

[font size="2"]This years goals:[/font]

[font size="2"] - Down my first archery buck -[/font] I pass on smaller bucks all the time each year, and since we hunt elk way hard I usually don't give myself time to really hunt any of the decent buck we see. This year if I see a shooter archery buck, I'm putting in the time to get'r dun.

[font size="2"] - Archery spike elk on video -[/font] We're pretty successful when it come to hunting elk. My goal is to hold out for a spike and arrow it on video. Pretty lofty goal, but that's what goals are for.

[font size="2"] - Successfully help find, hunt and kill 3 good bulls -[/font] Like I mentioned we have three tags in the family. I'll be there the best I can to help get'r dun, and capture as much as I can on video.

????????We've been up the canyon a few times so far. We placed most the trail camera's and have even pulled pictures off one of them. So far we've only seen a couple bulls that really have our interest, but we've seen a ton of bulls, and some look to have some really good potential for the next few years too. The trail cam had close to 15 different bulls in the first week, 6 of which were 6x's and 1 which was sprouting 7th's. We're excited to continue to watch this camera and see what else wanders in.


[font size="1"]Thanks for reading!
-chad
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????????This weekend was incredible. Over Friday evening and Saturday morning we saw a total of 32 bulls. 5 of which we're shooter bulls and three of them we even gave names. Steve is a bull that's heavy on the back, decent on the front, has great beam length and decent width. He's the first one we saw friday night and he really stood out. He was roaming around with another 6x6 we eventually named Jeff because he's not a bad bull either. Jeff is really wide and decently long, he just didn't have the tine length that Steve had. On Saturday Morning we glassed a bunch of bulls at around 2 miles. There was one that stood out from the rest as being huge, we didn't name him as he was too far away to find any indentifying features on him but plan to find him again in the next few weeks. Later that morning we ran into a bull we eventually named Splitter. He's an all around great bull, but what sets him apart from the rest are his huge G4's and the fact that they're not done growing yet. Both side were balled off and showed signs that they still had room to grow and one of the sides was starting to split. Hence the name splitter. With those great featured My dad had no problem putting splitter on the top of his hit list. We'll see though, there's a lot more bulls on the mountain, and in next few weeks we'll be tracking them down.

????????Sorry for the poor quality of the video of splitter. He was a long ways off and I was rushed into getting some video of him as they were ready to crest over the ridge, so I couldn't get fully set up.

????????For the first time in a few years we saw a couple great bucks in the velvet. One of them was way to far away to determin his size, but the others were just 100 yards or so. They weren't huge by any means, but a lot bigger than the bucks we usually see.

????????And to finish off the post we did check the camera's but were totally busted by a herd of cattle. They sat in on the water hole for most the week, keeping all the bulls out. A little pissed about it, but there's no use crying. It sucks the see the water hole all chewed up like it is now though.

????????Next week we'll be pulling the cards on two of the camera's we haven't been able to check on yet. Should be sweet.

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????????So we made it back up to retrieve some pictures off a couple trail camera's. No surprise really, there were a ton of elk. Sadly one of the camera's (despite adjusting the time between taking picture) filled up after just two weeks. We'll have to tone it down even more or just plan on checking it more often. The other camera however holds a bigger card and lasted just fine even with elk sitting on it all day long. Things will get more interesting on these camera's once the rut kicks in and the bulls start taking an interest in all these cows.

????????We were really excited to see more deer. It's been a while since we've seen more than a couple deer in this location. With the sheep & cattle grazing all over the mountain, and the amount of elk it seems the deer population has dropped off. None of these deer are big by any means, but it's good to see some young bucks up and coming again.






????????Going to take a long camping trip this next week. A little fishing, some spotting and with any luck we'll check on our big bull trail camera this weekend.

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